China’s Largest Newspaper Group to Launch Blockchain Laboratory

People Capital, the venture capital arm of People’s Daily Online — the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party — has signed an agreement with Xunlei Limited to use the blockchain technology for innovation and to empower the Chinese economy and the world at large. The alliance between the companies is part of a global partnership agreement signed earlier this year at the China-US Entrepreneur and Investment Summit, hosted by People’s Daily Online in the United States.

People’s Daily Online is the online version of China’s largest newspaper, The People’s Daily, through which the Communist Party distributes its unfiltered views on contemporary events.

Also known as the “BitTorrent of China,” blockchain infrastructure provider Xunlei Limited started as a cloud computing company before pivoting to the blockchain technology industry. The company launched a distributed file system called The ThunderChain File System (TCFS) and ThunderChain Open Platform in July as an underlying technology to support DLT platforms.

Source: Business Wire

Under the partnership, People Capital and Xunlei will build a blockchain laboratory which will be used to explore meaningful use cases for blockchain technology across various business sectors. In addition to the laboratory, the alliance will see the creation of a service platform for organizing offline fintech events, workshops, and competitions to share, identify, and promote innovation in DLT startups.

The laboratory will be under the purview of People Capital’s Blockchain Research Institute, which serves as a research platform focusing on distributed ledger technology. Speaking on the announcement, Xunlei CEO Lei Chen said the partnership highlights the company’s focus on research and development of blockchain-related technologies and the ecosystem as a whole. He also commented on the company’s ThunderChain, which it says would be developed further and launched on a mainnet.

The ThunderChain Open Platform is a decentralized file storage system, which Xunlei claims can process “over 1 million transactions per second and is embedded with strong scalability and stability.”

Last month, CCN reported on the launch of the world’s first blockchain identity laboratory called the Blockpass Identity Lab. Launched as part of a £600,000 collaboration between Hong Kong-based blockchain-based identity firm Blockpass IDN and the Edinburgh Napier University, the research facility will apply distributed ledger technology toward the protection of personal data.